Alicia Carpenter didn't plan on becoming a tutor, let alone an executive at a tutoring firm, but when she realized her passion and skill for
"You don't always end up where you think you will, and even when you do, it doesn't always turn out the way that you think," Carpenter says. "So if you make the most of each opportunity you're given, you'll probably end up where you need to go. I feel like that's been a real theme in my life and choices."
Starting out as a tutor in undergrad, Carpenter quickly realized that she had a gift for creating the kind of
"The exploitative structure was making it really difficult for me to do my job — traditional tutoring companies will usually pay their employees 20-30% of what they're charging families," she says. "So not only was I not able to sufficiently recruit and retain talent for my own company, but as director I was only getting paid 50% of my own hours as my salary."
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The experience struck a chord, and in 2014 Carpenter teamed up with two like-minded people in the space to become the founding tutor at Forum Education, a New York City-based firm that serves as a "talent agency for tutors." The company vets and selects top-tier academic and test prep professionals to serve elementary through graduate school clients. Only 2% of applicants make the cut, but those who do are then independent contractors with the highest-paying tutoring agency in the U.S. — something Carpenter is very proud of. When the company started, the highest-earning tutors were making $275 an hour; now they're making $1,050, she says.
"[Our] mission [was to create] a place where tutors would actually want to work [and where] families [would] get the best value," she says. "And what evolved from that was a complete flip-the-script model. Forum takes 15% of what they charge families and tutors make everything else. It's part-time hours and full-time income."
That model supports Carpenter, too — as a mom of two, she knew boundaries around work-life balance would be table stakes. That meant learning to advocate for herself early on, which paid off: Carpenter became Forum's CEO in 2022 while raising her sons, then 3 ½ years old and 7 months, and then transitioned to president and COO in 2024. She still tutors as well.
"Once you start to realize what you're worth and to understand the market, the better it is to advocate for what you need for stability," she says. "Ultimately [Forum] saw potential in me, they understood the vision they wanted for the company, and delivered."
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Carpenter recently spoke with EBN about taking on executive roles and how she manages time as a mother of two.
What led to your decision to accept the role of CEO at Forum, followed by the transition to president and COO?
From a personal standpoint, it was a stressful decision for our family, because it meant adding more hours into my day where I was away from my kids. But while it wasn't necessarily the ideal solution for my present, I could already see that it was the best solution for my future. You have to make those decisions sometimes where [you think], 'I'm making a sacrifice for a year or two, because the opportunity has come up at this time.' That's something I don't regret doing. If you have a strong vision for your life and a vision of what you want it to look like, it makes it easier to make these short-term sacrifices to get there.
Because of the leadership that I had put in over those first eight years, Forum was willing to make adjustments to what my role looked like in terms of responsibilities and what my hours looked like in terms of flexibility in a way that I would never have been able to do in a traditional corporate setting. After those initial two years [as CEO], we were expanding so much that I could not [run everything] on my own. We made a really meaningful hire — our client-facing person — another working mom who was a successful independent tutor and former classroom teacher. And [one of] our founder[s] came back [as] CEO, so now we're handling it as a team.
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How did your professional life change when you became a mom?
I found that there's lots of elements of parenting that I thought I would be a little bit more glib about that are actually deeply emotionally important to me, and it's been really challenging to manage ambition with that. There are certainly times where I've purposely said no to additional responsibilities, because I felt like it was important for me to spend more time with my family. And I wondered constantly, is this going to have an impact? Are my kids going to remember it later? Is it going to be as much of a difference as I want it to be, as opposed to what I'm giving up in terms of the potential of pursuing that opportunity? And I just kind of made my peace with it, but I know that overall, I figured out who I am as a parent, which is that it's really important for me to be around when I can, and I had the luxury of having an income where I can make those kinds of choices.
What impact do you hope your professional achievements will have on your sons?
When I was presented with the opportunity to have a flexible executive role, it spoke to so many things that were important to me — for my family and also for myself. I've always been a leader, so when I had this opportunity, and I had an executive team who saw that potential in me, it was important for me to be able to develop and give permission to that, which is important for my kids to see as well. I was able to deal with the short-term stress in order to say, eventually, not only am I going to get to be a leader, my kids are going to see that I'm going to fulfill this part of myself and it's something that I love.
